to preserve Iraq's natural re- sources and infrastructure, to minimize "collateral damage" (civilian casualties), and even to allow much of the Iraqi Army to survive so that it could help to restore order after the war. In that light, it seemed to some that Franks's first proposal, for some two hundred thousand troops- less than half the number used to oust Saddam from Kuwait in the first Gulf War-was rel- atively modest. Rumsfeld's starting position, what Franks called the other "bookend" in the range of op- tions, was "a little bitty ground force" --eighty thousand troops or less-"and overwhelming airpower." The view that wars can be won mostly with air- power is an irksome one to Army officers, and Franks is no exception. "My response to that was 'How did we do with the Kuwaiti oil fields the last time we took that approach?' " Dur- ing the thirty-eight-day bombing cam- paign that preceded the ground war in Operation Desert Stonn, Saddam's forces blackened the Gulf skies by igniting the Kuwaiti oil fields. In response to the proposition that a significant ground force wasn't required, Franks again cited the first Gulf War. "How long did it take to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait? The answer to the question is: Duration of the war." For all the bombing, Saddam's forces did not quit Kuwait until they were chased out by American tanks. As Rumsfeld and his circle argued from one bookend, Franks slowly worked his way down from the other ("You have to have somebody for the enemy to give their guns to"), until a compromise sug- gested itself: the war would start with a force of a hundred thousand or less, but deployment orders would be given to a much larger force, which could be fed into the battlefield as needed, through an open "pipeline." It was an elegant solution. Rumsfeld's model would be given a chance to work, and if that failed the war would be won the Army way, with overwhelming ground force. "If the cost begins to ap- proach a gamble," Franks says, "then you "I'm still digging out from my parents. " it. He asked Franks to bring him a plan for an invasion of Iraq. Franks's plan amounted to the military establishment's blueprint for the Ameri- can way of war. It was what Franks calls the "no-risk plan," and having helped draft it he knew it cold. As Franks says, it called for "a whole bunch of divisions, a whole bunch of jets, a whole bunch of bombs, a whole bunch of aircraft carriers." That translated to a force of more than two hundred thousand troops, including three divisions of "heavy" forces-armored tanks and personnel carriers. It was not at all what Rumsfeld had in mind. "That is tnùy, I mean, that is a big force," Rumsfeld said, as Franks recalls it. "That's absolutely right," Franks re- sponded. "Do we need that?" Rumsfeld asked. "Absolutely not," Franks said. "I'm gonna come next week and we'll talk about a little bit different variant of this." Franks's recollection plainly softens his exchanges with Rumsfeld, which were, by most accounts, quite heated at times. Rumsfeld himself has said that when he and his team looked at the off-the-shelf plan for Iraq, their reaction was "Noway! That's not going to work" 60 THE NEW YOR.KER., JUNE 30 2003 . . For several months, Franks kept coming back with new plans. It was an arduous, excruciating process, one very closely followed by the military grape- vine. The Powell doctrine itself was at stake. Implicirly; the Powell doctrine held that the commitment of overwhelming force carried such a political cost that the civilian leadership would resort to it only cautiously. Many in the last two Administrations, however, believed the doctrine had led to a paralyzing aversion to risk "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Madeleine Al- bright once asked Colin Powell. Devo- tion to a fixed idea of "overwhelming force" also tended to stifle doctrinal in- novation and battlefield ingenuit)r. The argument for using a large force in any new Gulf war was pardy based on an estimate of Saddam's military strength at as high as three hundred and seventy-five thousand troops. But there was also the ambitious nature of the mis- sion itself As the war plan evolved, it be- came clear that the Bush Administration meant to send the American military on a truly audacious undertaking: simulta- neously to overturn Saddam's regime,